Reports

Webcasts

Mozilla has issued a number of developer statements on its blog detailing its efforts to try and advance the Web as the platform of choice for high-end game development.

The organization's latest work with JavaScript allows game developers to leverage the scale of the Web without the additional costs associated with third-party plugins.

To make these advancements possible, Mozilla explains that it has developed a highly optimized version of JavaScript capable of "supercharging" gaming code in the browser itself.

"With this technology, we are also opening up the path for 3D web-based games on mobile as JavaScript performance continues to close the gap with native," says the company.

Further developments are occurring in this space with Mozilla as the firm teams up with Epic Games. Using this new JavaScript optimization technology, Mozilla says it has been able to port Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the Web.

Mozilla BananaBread game demo is built using web technologies including WebGL, Emscripten, and now asm.js. "The demo shows how high-end games can easily be ported to JavaScript and WebGL while still maintaining a highly responsive, visually compelling 3D gaming experience," says the firm.

Developers wishing to test this technology can check out the latest version of BananaBread (at the above link) with its peer-to-peer multiplayer WebRTC technology and JavaScript performance improvements. BananaBread works in all browsers that support WebGL.

Mozilla concludes, "As high-performance games on the Web move to rival native performance, Mozilla is also opening up the path to Web-based games on mobile. We are working with premium game publishers such as Disney, EA, and ZeptoLab who are using the same technology to bring performance optimizations to their top-rated games."

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task.
However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Video

This month's Dr. Dobb's Journal

This month,
Dr. Dobb's Journal is devoted to mobile programming. We introduce you to Apple's new Swift programming language, discuss the perils of being the third-most-popular mobile platform, revisit SQLite on Android
, and much more!